Biz & IT —

Adobe Illustrator CS3

Tool upgrades

The majority of time spent in Illustrator isn't usually with filters; it's usually spent just dealing with paths and tweaking, so CS3 hopes to make working more efficient by upgrading the basics—the first of which is anchor point highlighting and picking. The older versions of Illustrator used to pick anchor points based on stacking order as opposed to proximity to the cursor, which is now fixed. Picking is also made easier by highlighting the anchor points and paths as you mouse over them—paths are indicated by a black square next to the arrow and anchor points are indicated by a white square.

Click for animation

As you can tell by the animation, this makes working with complex paths a lot easier, and it reduces a lot of redundant selection trying to get to the anchor points you just want to deal with. You can further customize the behavior of this in the application's Preferences:

For such a simple change, the new anchor point handling really adds a lot.

Another thing that will definitely please avid Illustrator users is the ability to align and distribute selected points, not just objects. Select any multiple anchor points and watch in wonder as the hamsters inside Illustrator CS3 busily arrange the points when you click align:

Click for animation

It's definitely a great addition, but this is another thing that just makes sense to have, and users of the venerable FilterIt plug-in have had this ability for a while now. Sure, it's not exactly fair to say software isn't complete if it doesn't have the equivalent third party plug-in already installed, but aligning selected points is such a basic thing for Illustrator that it's kind of shocking it's taken 13 versions for it to make it into the app. Clearly FilterIt was just filling a basic need here, and it had the added advantage of being a tool invoked by a keyboard shortcut; something you can't do with the align options in AI CS3. Still, for everyday Illustrator use, this is a big plus, so I can't complain.

Isolation mode

A significant improvement in illustrator CS3 is its handling of objects and groups/subgroups in the "I think he might be depressed"-named Isolation mode. If you had a group of objects and within those you had subgroups, older versions of Illustrator weren't very good at dealing clearly with this, so CS3 has cleaned up the whole process and makes dealing with subgroups painless.

A mask group is double-clicked to edit the contents of the mask. Click for animation.

Checking the top of the window indicates what level you are in within the groups:

This isolation mode menu is probably familiar to Flash users, and when you've created Flash-ready symbols, this editing hierarchy works much the same as in Flash. Once you've edited one of these symbols in the Isolation mode, the others update accordingly. Isolation mode overall is finally an effective scheme for dealing with many subgroups, and it's going to help clearly manage larger illustrations.

Eraser tool

It would seem pretty simple to have an erase tool in Illustrator, but vectors are more complicated than just masking some pixels, so it is pretty understandable that it's new. In older version of Illustrator, if you wanted to cut a flowing brush stroke out of a letter for a logo, it was a multistep process: make a brush stroke over some outlined text with a custom brush, flatten the path so it was outlined, and then do a front-minus-back Boolean operation in the Pathfinder palette. Pretty straightforward in itself, but when you start to add layers and groups to this, it gets complicated. In AI CS3, the eraser tool lets you do this in one brush stroke—while respecting objects on multiple layers and any existing effects:

It's also pretty sweet for making rounded trims that have a more organic feel.

If you hold down option/alt, the eraser becomes a square marquee selection that subtracts a rectangle from objects.

But the eraser tool doesn't work consistently. If you go over a stroked object, you will get mixed results:

Also, it doesn't do image masks, so if you have a complex illustration, these two limitations will force a bit of a workaround by outlining all strokes. It would have been nice if the eraser tool had this as an automatic option.

Crop area tool

While Illustrator already includes the ability to make crop marks for printing output, CS3 now adds a crop tool feature that is used more like a slice but with subtly different usage, and unlike slices, multiple crop areas (created by option dragging with the tool active) do not bite into other crop areas. They're like visual workspaces, and for things like packaging, where it can be a little hard to envision what one fold may look like, it makes short work of previewing that part in context:

My EP art cropped to the front face.

The old way was to make four white boxes around your workspace so you could get a feel for what the cropped art would look like. It was pretty ghetto and a big waste of time. Also, you can instantly make a crop area around selected objects. These crop areas can then be used as slices for Save for Web, document bounds for PDF export, or as reference frames for alignment and distribution, so it definitely has the potential to save work.

But, in what is beginning to sound a little repetitive, the crop tool is just shy of being polished. While it works nicely as a preview for cropped documents, you can't create your own presets, which seems to fly in the face of AI CS3's whole empowering of the user. I do these techno vinyl sleeves a lot, and seeing this long list of video options when I just want a 12"x12" preview crop for the front and the back is a bit annoying:

My kingdom for a vinyl cover and single page of our magazine preset

On top of that, crop areas can't be promoted to slices, you can't adjust the color or the opacity of the overlay, and PDFs exported with the cropped areas failed to use bleed or crop marks. Creation of the boxes is finicky, too: they can't be option-dragged like slices, and copying and pasting between sizes in documents is inconsistent and frustrating. For the crop tool to be truly great, it would have the customizable presets of document profiles and the ability to have an InDesign-like 100 percent opaque trim preview. As is, it's a decent tool for art with multiple intended outputs (DVD interface, business card, etc.), but it's needlessly limited.